


scratches

by fairbanks



Series: goretober 2018 [11]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ?????, F/F, Goretober 2018, Scratching, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 23:05:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16274219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairbanks/pseuds/fairbanks
Summary: Basira's grip on reality after the Unknowing is shaky at best.





	scratches

  1. **scratches**



 

When Basira understand words again there is a message on her phone. When she understands phones again she plays it to hear this:

 

“Hello Basira, Elias Bouchard here. Let me be the first to congratulate you on your survival and the victory against the Unknowing, and the first to offer my condolences for the losses. I understand you’ll be very… scattered, as it were, so please listen to the message a second time when you’re done. It is important you  _ know _ everything I am about to tell you.

 

Tim is dead, and if it’s any comfort there was nothing you could do for him. Jon is alive- well, that’s a complicated explanation, and right now you want to hear about Alice Tonner, don’t you?

 

I’m afraid Daisy was lost to us. A vague and frustrating answer, I’m sure, but truthful. I’m going to offer you something as a reward for your good work, though you will not see it as such. Perhaps you won’t believe me at all and throw the gift away. It doesn’t matter, it is yours to do with as you will.

 

You cannot find Alice Tonner, Basira. You cannot save her, you will never see the woman you knew again. You may see what she has become one day, but for your sake I hope you do not.

 

Now, that unpleasantness aside, I’m afraid I must keep this brief. Follow your instinct back to the site of the explosion. Follow it regardless of any interference, insist you know the whereabout of a survivor- because you do. Follow that Basira, and you will find Jon. Get him to an ambulance and make sure they check for brain activity.

 

Best of luck to you, Basira. The next few months will be quite long and lonely, I fear.”

 

-

 

She wraps the chair around herself- blanket. She wraps the blanket around herself, runs her fingers over it until the delay registers  _ wool. _ Hospital chairs aren’t comfortable but Basira forgets that, a realization that comes in cycling discomfort. It’s not always like this, so muddled and dancing, but the tremors are still there, aftershocks. She wishes Jon was here to  _ ask _ and crack the ice that occasionally shelled over her knowing. That’s probably why she’s here.

 

“So still, like this,” someone says, and it takes Basira a moment to know she should be alone. Until she realizes she just nods in agreement, because everything is so still like this- Jon, the room, her everything.

 

But she does know she should be alone, and when she looks up a thing like a woman stands next to a door that doesn’t belong. The woman-like thing moves to Jon’s bedside- not walks, she doesn’t walk, really. She reminds Basira of a kaleidoscope, the slightest shift of her head has the woman-thing jeweled and shaped in new ways. Basira closes her eyes, focuses, and remembers that every one of those ways are  _ wrong. _

 

“Who… are you?”

 

“Who,” says the woman, looks at her with eyes like an optical illusion. Basira forgets to know the true shape of a person sometimes now and because of that this who seems more natural than it should. “I am a who that should be a what, and one day will be. I think I am still who enough to fear that day. Who are you?”

 

“Sometimes I forget,” Basira admits, because there’s something about this kaleidoscope woman that doesn’t come with the urge to pull herself together. “I’m signed on with the Archives now, so I suppose that makes me trapped. I prefer Basira.”

 

“A who consumed by a what,” the woman offers, and then, “The archivist calls me Helen, sometimes, when he sees my who and not my what.”

 

“You’re here for him?”

 

Helen considers, looks at the man still on the bed, so still. “Yes. I think I am.”

 

They’re quiet for a few moments, companionable, more so than when Martin was visiting and felt the need to fill the silences between the three with chatter. “I don’t know if I’m here for him,” Basira admits. “I used to have a place I knew where to be, behind someone who’s lost now. I think… part of me was lost there too. I think he could help me find it.”

 

“If he listened,” Helen says.

 

“If he listened,” Basira agrees quietly.

 

“So you’re here for you and your pieces. Do you need them back so badly?”

 

Basira wonders, thinks it should be nonsense words thrown back and forth but like this she can see a weaving connection of conversation and an endpoint. “I just… I don’t know. I want to  _ know _ again.”

 

Helen nods like she understands.

 

-

 

Peter Lukas praises her when they meet. “A wonderful job, really, well done. You’re quite reliable aren’t you, Basira?”

 

Basira nods, thinks that that’s what they always called Sasha. Reliable old Sasha, right to the end. This may be Basira’s end, a steep cliff and a downward curve, instead of a monster wearing her skin it’s just her only different. Just her only without a direction, a foundation to stand on. Peter watches her with interest and says:

 

“A shame about Miss Tonner.”

 

This is where Basira should hurt, should feel endlessly lonely. This is where her direction crashed, lost in circus music and shrapnel. She knows loneliness but doesn’t remember yet how to use it to mourn, to hurt. She looks at it, accepts it as there, and watches Peter Lukas smile all the more. He offers her time off and she takes it. Reliable old Basira.

 

Melanie’s consumed with rage, Martin with sorrow. They try to reach her, to share their feelings but she can only nod. She doesn’t think they notice really, to chewed up and spit out, too inward. A shame about Daisy, they say carefully. A shame, a shame.

 

“You’re safer like this,” Helen tells her in the hospital room. She is curled up in a chair that is both too small and too large for her. Basira remembers hearing of Michael, his hands like wet bags, knives. Helen’s hands are wires, thin and wrapping too tight around fleshy mass of shapes that are not what hands should be. When Basira blinks they flop off meaty chunks, she blinks again and all is right. One more and they look as hands probably should be, though Basira does not always remember it.

 

“What? Confused? Dazed?” Basira asks. “This isn’t real.”

 

“Reality isn’t static. Reality is what you see. What do you see?”

 

Basira looks and sees Helen’s hair pulled in a tight bun, strands and locks escaping to frame her face in perfect spirals. She looks and Helen’s skin pulls over bones that jut wrong, her teeth wrong, everything wrong as reality should be. In truth it’s hard to remember so Helen is just… Helen. A strange thing in Jon’s hospital room, that leaks jewelled refractions of light against the walls and listens better than anyone ever has- other than Jon.

 

She tells Helen this, all that she sees, and Helen smiles at her in an endless curl. It’s nice, she thinks, to have someone smile at her like that.

 

-

 

“I never kissed Daisy,” she tells Helen one day, because with Helen she doesn’t hold reality as it should be so closely. The machines connected to Jon whir, soft. Helen whirs too, clanking brittle wet. “I think I should have.”

 

“Perhaps you did,” Helen tells her, and Basira can’t argue that. “What is a kiss?”

 

“Lips on lips, understanding,” Basira tries and Helen shakes her spiral curls. Helen laughs, discordant chimes, a tone that is always rising but never gets higher. “It’s soft.”

 

Helen watches her, is closer without moving in a way Basira can track. The thing she has like eyes take in Basira’s face and Helen leans in. She doesn’t have lips but then she does, against Basira’s. They are soft but they cut her, Helen’s wire fingers scratch down Basira’s arms and, for that moment, Basira’s never felt anything more lovely, softer.

 

“Lips on lips, understanding,” Helen offers, and Basira licks blood from her split bottom lip. “I think I want to learn to miss you, Basira. While I have the chance.”


End file.
